In the publishing field, content items in digital form such as news, features, photos, articles, graphics and other items are available for publishing via the Internet and through other services. For example, such content items may be obtained from the Associated Press or other news organizations. Also, many newspapers are becoming national in scope exporting their content to individuals all over the United States via the Internet or other networks.
In order to facilitate transmission of news articles over the Internet and other networks, news publishers have adopted a special digital format to be employed for news articles. This format is called the News Industry Text Format (NITF). The NITF provides a solution for sharing news developed by the world's leading news publishers. NITF uses the Extensible Markup Language (XML) to define the content and structure of news articles using metadata. Because metadata is applied throughout the news content, NITF documents are far more searchable and useful than web pages written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or regular text formats.
By using NITF, publishers can adapt the look, feel, and interactivity of their documents to the bandwidth, devices, and personalized needs of their subscribers. These documents can be translated into HTML, WML (for wireless devices), RTF (for printing), or any other format the publisher wishes. NITF was developed by the International Press Telecommunications Council, an independent international consortium of the world's leading news agencies and publishers. It is a standard that is open, public, proven, well used, well documented, and well supported.
Unfortunately, much of the available content in digital format is not composed using the NITF standard. For example, many news articles are made available in text format or other formats. As a consequence, applications that require articles and the like to conform with NITF cannot process such articles. This presents a problem in that many publishers who create the content items in text file format do not have the technical expertise to generate the content items in NITF or to create stylesheets or other means by which content items are transformed from text files into NITF.